Ratiometric Autofluorescence Lifetime Imaging System Standardization And Application For Head And Neck Cancer

Dynamic optical contrast imaging (DOCI) is a novel optical imaging technology that rapidly generates image contrast from measurements of aggregate endogenous fluorescence lifetime in a clinically meaningful field of view. Recently, our use of this system in both human ex-vivo and in-vivo specimens generated statistically significant contrast between tumor and adjacent normal tissue in biopsies taken from patients undergoing surgery for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and primary hyperthyroidism. In this work we evaluated the components and resolution of our next-generation DOCI system. We also standardized the quantitative output of our system against the fluorescence lifetime values of three dye standards with monoexponential decay using a commercial Leica two-photon fluorescence lifetime imaging microscope. Significantly, our system continued to demonstrate clinically meaningful contrast between tissue samples with multiexponential decay in near real-time.